Once one dismisses
The rest of all possible worlds
One finds that this is
The best of all possible worlds

So lyricist John La Touche paraphrased Dr. Pangloss in Leonard Bernstein's 1956 adaptation of Candide. What was true in Voltaire's day was true in Eisenhower's and in ours: Optimism can be taken too far.

The basic argument of Winners, Losers and Microsoft, a controversial study from Oakland, Calif.-based economic policy think tank The Independent Institute, is that we should all be happy that Microsoft dominates the market for PC operating systems, word processing, Web browsers and other software. Indeed, economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis reveal, Microsoft products are so superior, and so useful when networked together, that we have collectively decided to give the company a virtual monopoly.